Breathing Slowly
by kilisdwarfprincess
Summary: Eve Kitsch is not having the best night. She loves her job as a nurse at Gotham General but her bad timing lands her in the hands of the Ragusa mob clan and then into the hands of none other than Gotham's resident Clown of Chaos. Post-Dark Knight.


**Title:** Breathing Slowly

**Author:** kilisdwarfprincess

**Date:** 1/2/2013

**Verse:** Nolan Verse, with comic elements twisted in to the verse.

**Rating:** M for gore, language, adult situations and so on and so forth

**Summary:** Eve Kitsch is not having the best night. She loves her job as a nurse at Gotham General but her bad timing lands her in the hands of the Ragusa mob clan and then into the hands of none other than Gotham's resident Clown of Chaos. Post-Dark Knight.

**Length:** Multi-chaptered.

**Disclaimer:** All the locations, characters and story arcs within the DC Comic and Nolan-verse belong to their respective owners. I only claim ownership over my original characters and the major story arcs that were created solely for the purpose of this work of fan fiction. No money is being made from this work. It is for entertainment value only.

**Author's Note: **Not much to say to be honest. I wrote this on a whim one night out of nowhere and just felt like rolling with it.

**YouTube Video:** Breathing Slowly Teaser (queenofthecards)

**Feedback: **Very welcome and appreciated.

**Beta-Reader:** Three Faint Calls.

* * *

Gotham was worse than ever. The crime rate was rising by the day and though the esteemed members of the Gotham City Police Department were doing their best, they were unsuccessful in bringing it back down. Black Gate Prison was overcrowded and Arkham Asylum was now being controlled and held under close scrutiny by the mayor's office in order to make sure that each patient that was there should be there.

Scarecrow and the League of Shadows had done a good job in pulling Gotham down but it was the Joker, the Clown Prince of Chaos, who had truly dragged them into the deepest pit of hell and left them there.

All the hope within the people of Gotham dwindled when Harvey Dent, the city's own White Knight of Justice, was found dead. He had been murdered by the Batman. Commissioner Gordon had been witness to it, had informed the city in an address not long after the Joker's "pranks" stopped occurring.

The Batman never showed his face again and even with the signing of the Harvey Dent Act, Gotham's streets were inundated with constant dangers.

There was simply darkness now. The very same darkness that had once consumed the city before the Batman had come to their rescue and began cleaning the streets up.

The crime lords of the city were in control of as much as they could get their greedy, filthy hands on; from the Narrows to Gotham's upper-class, from street-walkers to lawyers to the dock workers. They fought amongst each other still, there would be a shoot-out one day or a body would turn up in an alley the next and the newspaper grabbed it up and spread the updates to the populace.

Gotham General Hospital was no exception, either: not only did the mob run it now but with the rise in crime, it was overcrowded, understaffed and barely able to keep their stores up. No matter how many patients were treated, five more would take their place in the waiting room dealing with some form of illness or wounds from bullets or knives.

Like many others longing for a life that didn't have the shadow of death looming over their head every moment of the day, Eve knew that unless things started to turn around, Gotham City would soon be nothing more than a pit of sin and horror.

Each day she was more and more surprised the prisoners of Black Gate had not managed to break out and cause a mass riot yet.

Shutting the door of her locker, Eve straightened out the white singlet she had pulled on after changing out of her scrubs before tightening the black belt that held up her dark green skinny jeans. She hardly looked like a nurse without her uniform on but she liked it that way.

She knew from experience that leaving the hospital after her shifts in bloodstained, germ covered scrubs was a sure fire way of drawing unwanted attention, so she always changed.

Her backpack was heavy as she pulled it onto her shoulders, weighed down by the medical supplies she always carried with her these days. She had been doing it since the night she'd been riding the subway and a thug had shot a man in the arm. She'd managed to patch him up after the guy had darted out onto the subway platform with several wallets worth of cash.

Fixing her time card up and noticing that it was one in the morning, she sighed, weary and frustrated. She had class at nine and that meant, by the time she got home, she'd get a total of three hours sleep and then have to get her ass back up and repeat the day all over again.

Sluggishly she made her way out of the locker room and down through the crowded hallway. People moaned in pain from injuries or were coughing their lungs up into face masks. It looked like some third world refugee shelter with the occupants of the hall in clothes shabbier and filthier than she could have ever seen. These people were the ones who lived and roamed the Narrows. To the city, they were the least important to be treated.

Tonight, while she had been aiding the chief surgeon in a hernia operation on a sixty year old, a man who was related to one of the infamous Ragusa boys, a little girl from the Narrows had passed away in the E.R. from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Her mother had done it. She'd been high as a kite and the teenage brother had illegally driven the poor little girl to the hospital in hopes of help.

Eve felt like Gotham was a lost cause and that she was helpless to stop its plummet into chaos. She wanted to cleanse the city but she was just one woman and Gotham was like a collapsing house: she could fill it with pretty things and try to cover up its flaws with paint, but that wouldn't stop it from decaying.

Digging her hands into the pockets of her jeans, head down and music roaring in her ears, Eve left the hospital through the staff only entrance and was startled out of her reverie by the sudden brutal grip of meaty fingers over her mouth.

Terror sunk in and Eve struggled. She felt another arm wrap round her torso, dragging her back into a solid chest. She screamed muffled cries into the hand over her mouth and tried to reach up and yank the hand away.

She never had the chance to even see who had grabbed her as a blunt object, hard and cold was slammed into the side of her face and she sunk into a world of black.

* * *

He sat there; one hand clutching a small blood soaked towel to his side and another to the base of his throat. His complexion was pale and his eyes were unfocused. Tony Ragusa had certainly seen better days. Sitting in his office chair in the docking yards, he was barely breathing and conscious.

The office held three other men all who were sporting various cuts and abrasions on their persons.

"Fucking clown!" growled the blonde, wincing as he held a makeshift bag of ice to his bruised ribs.

A chorus of similar opinions rose from the other two men. The Ragusa boy with a long dark mane of hair pulled into a ponytail was lying out on the floor, his leg bandaged up over his pants.

"Wait til we get back on our feet, I'm going tear him limb from limb," the dark-haired one muttered and brought a hand up to tentatively finger the J that had been burned into his cheek. "Fucking freak, I'll make him beg before I finish with him."

The red head Ragusa boy who sat with his back against the wall and one of his eyes sliced down the middle just chuckled at the threats being thrown out from the other two.

"Where the fuck are Mickey and Armo anyhow?!" Tony shouted, startling his boys into silence.

As if they'd been waiting for their queue to come in, the door burst open and the two in question – Mickey and Armo – limped in, carrying between them an unconscious woman. Armo, the larger more bulky man of the two had a backpack slung over his shoulder. He kicked the door shut with his boot.

Without ceremony, they let the woman drop onto the floor and then tossed the backpack onto the desk.

"What the hell is this?" Tony demanded of the two.

Armo spoke first: "You wanted us to get supplies. Well this pretty little thing was leaving the hospital out of the nurse's entrance so we figured we'd grab her so you were stitched up good and proper, boss."

Tony eyed the unconscious nurse on the floor, eyes raking over full hips and the bare portion of her stomach that had been revealed by her shirt riding up. After a moment he nodded. "Shame that we're gonna have to put a bullet in such a beauty once she's done," he mused.

Armo crouched down over the woman and slapped her across the face. The groan that elicited from the woman made Tony smirk; maybe they'd have some fun before he got rid of her and they moved on.

* * *

Eve groaned when she felt the blow to her face. It stung and she opened her eyes, wincing at the harsh light that suddenly flooded her vision. Bringing a hand up to her cheek, she wondered where she was and very slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, bracing her weight on her palms.

She could hear whispering and cautiously looked up in the direction of where the voices were coming from. Her startled gasp drew their attention as she scrambled backwards only to have two large hands grip her biceps rather roughly.

Glancing round she found herself staring at an enormous man with dark shaggy hair, a split bottom lip and a black eye. Eve tugged on his grip, trying to pull herself free.

A chuckle made her glance back across the room. "Glad to see the help is awake," the man with greying hair drawled from where he sat in the large leather chair behind the desk.

Help?

Eve sneered and renewed her attempt to break free. "You're mob boys, I don't help the mob," she seethed.

"I'm afraid, my lovely little nurse that if you wish to keep those beautiful eyes where they lay; you will help us."

Anger bubbled inside her. She knew if she didn't help them, she was dead and if she _did_ help them, she was dead. Assisting them just meant prolonging the inevitable.

Her silence seemed to be her answer and she was roughly picked up from the ground and hauled over to the large desk. Seeing her backpack she reached out for it and then hesitated, feeling the grip on her arms tighten.

"Armo, let her go, she'll need her hands and that bag if she is going to be helping us," the man drawled and then the pressure on her arms was gone.

Ah, they wanted her to patch them up. The man in the chair looked like if she left him for a good fifteen minutes longer he would die from blood loss. Pity they'd grabbed her when they did. She wished whoever had done this had finished the job.

Despite a slight shake in her movements, Eve took in a deep breath and then stepped round to the man behind the desk. She reached out slowly and pulled the towel away from his chest. The cut was long and deeper towards the top which ended right at the base of his throat.

She grabbed her backpack and opened it, turning it over and letting the contents spill over the desk. As she was grabbing a glove, some staples to close the wound with and gauze, she didn't fail to notice that every man in the room was watching her.

Brushing her hair out of face and pulling the glove on, determined not to get too much of their blood on her fingers, she leaned over the mobster and began to wipe the blood away from the top of the wound.

Eve wasn't stupid; she knew they were leering. The one she was looking after probably had a _great_ view down the front of her top right now. Irritated, she _accidentally _pinched the wound too tight on the next staple, apologizing without much sincerity.

She told herself to just get the job down as quickly as she could and then move on to the next one. Part of her wanted to ask what had happened, because when she was with patients she generally talked to keep them distracted from their discomfort.

But she had a feeling that if she asked any questions, she wouldn't like the answers.

"Hey doll, how's a pretty thing like you not some model instead of stitching people up for a living?"

Glancing over her shoulder, her eyes landed on the dark-haired one lying on the floor. She turned back to the other man as she finished with the first injury, securing the gauze over it and then moving on to the much deeper one at his side.

"He asked you a question." The growl was meant to frighten her but with the man's current condition she certainly didn't feel the least bit intimidated.

With a reluctant sigh as she grabbed a pack with a needle and some twine in it, her eyes spied the red head resting against the wall with his eye viciously maimed and then back to the mobster right before her. She was making a list of the visible injuries.

"Don't see posing for a camera worthwhile," she began, carefully setting to work cleaning the blood up and then stitching the wound together, grimacing when she heard the man grunting as the needle pierced his flesh with each go. "Would rather be stitching people up for a living and feeling like I did something good at the end of the day."

She didn't hide the disdain in her voice. No, if she was going to die tonight, Eve wasn't going to let herself give in to them so easily. If they wanted to kill her, well, they'd have a hellcat ready for a fight.

Her anger was causing her hands to tremble slightly.

Here she was stitching up criminals when she could've stayed at the hospital and helped the innocent people there.

The big man upstairs certainly didn't like her tonight that was for sure.

* * *

Eve didn't know how long it took her to fix each one of the men up, especially after having a difficult time with red head and the dark-haired flirt on the floor. They were insufferable and it was hard to deal with the constant flirtatiousness, especially since she'd had to unbuckle his pants and pull them to his knees in order to deal with the injury on his upper thigh.

As she sat on the floor, wiping her stained fingers with a leftover bandage, Eve didn't fail to notice that Tony Ragusa was now standing and slipping into a coat. They were leaving. She remained quiet, knowing what was to come now her work was done.

Slowly standing up, she looked at each of the men who now either stood straight or were leaning against the man by them for support.

Tony approached her and she kept her head turned away from him, refusing to meet his eyes. She felt a hand on her cheek and shuddered.

"Such a shame that we couldn't have met in a more pleasant situation, pretty one," he told her.

Eve finally looked at him and knew the disgust on her face was probably extremely evident.

"Keep your grubby fingers off me," she hissed, knocking his hand away from her cheek. "You're an old man. What makes you think that I would find myself wanting you in _any _situation?"

The anger flashed across his face and before Eve had the chance to pull back, his hand connected with her already bruised and sore cheek.

Clutching her cheek in one hand, partially from shock, Eve did one of the stupidest things in her life.

She slapped Tony Ragusa.

It didn't cause his head to snap back like hers had but it was effective enough in leaving a large red mark where her hand had connected.

"Let's go boys. Armo, get rid of her."

Eve's eyes darted to the big guy standing behind his boss and her heart stopped in her chest.

As soon as they cleared out and the door shut, Eve felt her stomach tighten painfully. He was three times wider than her and nearly three heads taller. She took a step back and he advanced on her. She retreated back into the desk, knocking into it and momentarily distracted by the pain in her hip gave Armo the opening to grab her by the throat.

Her hands grabbed at his thick wrist, clawing and hitting, anything to make him let her go. He stepped away from the desk and Eve felt her feet leave the floor as he lifted her up.

His hand alone was crushing her windpipe and as her breathing faltered, so did her attempts to struggle.

Right as she sat on the brink of slipping into the dark abyss of death, she heard glass shatter behind her and the hand crushing her throat was suddenly gone. She crumpled to the ground, clutching at her throat and choking for air.

She leaned her head against the floor, struggling to suck life back into her airways. Hearing laughter, Eve slowly lifted her gaze and felt her heart almost shatter in terror.

Leaning down before her was a clown mask. Horrified she scrambled backwards only to collide with someone's legs. Eve felt a hand twist into her hair and she cried out as she was dragged onto shaky feet.

Dread filled her; she had survived the mobsters only to wind up in the hands of thugs dressed in clown masks.

Twisting round, she suddenly brought her knee up and hit her captor right in the groin. He let go of her hair and she thought for a moment she had a small victory over him until his fist came towards her faster than she anticipated.

Pain exploded in her mid-section and she grabbed at the area, whimpering from the sheer shock of the blow. The hand returned to her hair and through her pain she realised they were pushing her towards the main centre of the room. She was suddenly shoved down to her knees and she stifled a groan.

"Ragusa high-tailed it already?"

The voice sounded strangely familiar to Eve and despite thinking herself stupid, she glanced over to Armo and felt her eyes widened in horror. The large man was kneeling before a figure that Eve would have had to have been blind and deaf not to recognise.

It was the infamous purple suited, painted up and homicidal Joker; Gotham's worst nightmare.

The Joker stood over Armo, a switchblade pressed into the man's mouth and his hand wrapped round the guy's thick jaw.

Eve recoiled and realized it was her first mistake. The Joker's eyes shifted towards her and she froze; held in place by a pair of the darkest eyes she'd ever come across. It may have been the black greasepaint slathered around them that made them look even more demonic but Eve didn't really care to know the answer. All she cared about was that he was still watching her, tongue flicking out to lick at his bottom lip every few seconds.

She shuddered, fear enveloping her and finally saw his eyes leave hers.

"Who's the woman?" he asked the man he was holding the jaw of.

Eve watched on in silence.

Armo spluttered, whining when the knife sliced into the soft flesh of the inside of his mouth. The Joker cackled and Eve wished she could turn her eyes away but worried that if she gave any sudden movement, even such a miniscule one, she'd be dead.

The blade was taken from Armo's mouth and the Joker reiterated his question, this time turning Armo's head towards her.

"Just- Just some broad," he remarked.

Eve scoffed and then slapped a hand to her mouth, eyes widening in shock. It must have looked comical beyond all hell when Eve thought about it.

"She seems to, ah, think differently on that," the Joker said, tossing the switchblade up and down casually, hand still wrapped around Armo's jaw.

Eve had not been oblivious to the Joker's exploits in Gotham a few weeks back and had read what he did to his victims. Slowly her hand dropped away from her mouth and she watched with dread as the Joker suddenly placed the switchblade back into Armo's mouth.

"Poor tubby, just another lamb for the slaughter," he growled.

Armo whimpered.

The clown thugs laughed behind their masks.

"You keep staring at my scars, tubby," Joker began, pausing to lick his lips, "Wanna know how I got 'em?" Eve saw him glance at her for a moment before his eyes returned to Armo's face. Armo didn't reply verbally but with a small shake of his head. "Well, I'm gonna tell ya."

Eve felt her mouth go dry and watched on in absolute horror as the Joker began to talk. She barely heard what he was saying, didn't really want to hear in truth. The droning in her ears and escalating pounding of her heart made Eve feel like at any moment she would have a panic attack.

A hand grabbed a fistful of her hair and Eve came back to the reality of the situation just as the Joker looked at her.

Eve brought a hand up and grabbed a hold of the chain about her neck. What terrified her most was the fact that the Joker kept his eyes on her.

"Why so serious beautiful?" he inquired, a nasty smirk pulling at his mouth as dragged the switchblade through Armo's mouth and up one of his cheeks.

Eve flinched but never took her eyes off the scene; even as the Joker let Armo go and he fell to the floor with a dull thud; twitching terribly.

The Joker straightened up then and turned his eyes away from her. Eve quickly shut her eyes and clutched at the chain and trinket it held tighter in her hand. She heard the Joker's voice; barking orders at his men and then the shuffling of feet coming closer to her. The presence of a man didn't go unnoticed and Eve heard the rustling of clothes right before she opened her eyes and lifted her gaze.

Her heart felt like it had seized up in her chest. The Joker was crouched down before her, head tilted to the side and the now bloodied switchblade pointed towards her.

She didn't know how long she sat there just staring before she managed to find her voice. "Are you gonna kill me?"

It came out almost as a squeak. All her bravery was gone. This wasn't a thug or mobster before her. This was the Joker.

A cackle suddenly erupted from the man before her and she shuddered at the sound of it. He pushed his very poorly dyed curls back off his face and she lowered her eyes to the floor, trying to think of something, anything that might appeal to him and save her hide.

"What's your name, beautiful?"

Eve's eyes darted back to his face and she glanced at Armo's body for a moment. She knew she had to answer him.

Part of her knew she was stalling, knew that he'd lose patience with her before she found the courage to answer him.

His hand shot out, clasping her jaw in a bruising, vice-like grip and Eve shuddered as she saw his eyes giving her a once over, his garish grin covered in bright red. The scars were distracting; they looked like they'd been poorly stitched together and she wouldn't have liked to be the one who had done such a poor job.

Eve stared with wide eyes at the Joker and noticed his eyes stayed lowered to her legs. Frowning she glanced down; her green jeans had drawn his attention.

He leaned down closer to her, dragging her face back to his, fingers digging into her jaw. "Your. Name."

"E- Eve Kitsch," she answered.

His tongue darted out to lick his scar and she held her breath. "Well, _Evie_," he drawled, clucking his tongue. "We're gonna play a little game." She simply stared at him, waiting for him to continue. He brought his switchblade up and Eve's eyes darted from his to the blade and she tried to recoil. "Ah-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta." He held her firm.

"If you're gonna kill me, do it, don't make a game of it," she seethed at him and saw a hint of surprise flicker across his face before it disappeared and he began to cackle.

She pulled a face at the rush of foul breath that wafted over her when he did.

"Oh beautiful, you're fiery aren't you? Hm," he remarked, fingers tightening round her jaw. She wanted to smack him senseless and run. She wanted a hot shower, her comfy bed and a cuddle from Sam right now. "Alright, we'll forgo the, uh, _game_ if you give me one good reason why I shouldn't split you from nose to navel."

Eve's mind went blank. Her heart froze in her chest and she felt at a loss as to what to say to him. Eyes leaving his, she went searching the room trying to come up with the best reason possible.

Her grey eyes landed on the medical supplies that were scattered over the desk and floor and now singed to a crisp from when the Joker and his men had made their entrance. Her eyes moved to where his men were and then to the Joker himself. They were all in similar shape to what the mobsters had been.

"I can patch you and your men up," she whispered, eyes rising to meet his.


End file.
